On Wed, 16 May 2001, ber kessels wrote:
> Maybe a silly question but where does foo-bar or foobar refer to?
>
> Everyone uses it in perl, but I cannot find the origin of it.
> I am not english (I am Duch), but even my english teacher didn't know it, he had
> even never heard of it.
foo and bar are, to put it simply, the canonical metasyntactic variables
used in programming examples. :-) You see thenm used all the time in C
coding examples: "Take function foo and pass it value bar..."
The actual phrase supposedly derives from an old (probably US) Army term
FUBAR -- Fouled[0] Up Beyond All Recognition.
-- Brett
[0] Or any other F word you choose to use to indicate a bad situation
